The brilliant French fiddler Jean-Luc Ponty was leading a double musical life in Paris in the early 1960s, performing with the symphonic orchestra Concerts Lamoureux before dashing over to the Blue Note to play jazz until 4 a.m.

Warned he'd be fired if he kept showing up late to the 9 a.m. orchestral rehearsal, Ponty bid adieu to classical music and carved out a singular place for himself in jazz and rock.

"Jazz, with its improvisation, fulfilled my dream of being a composer," says Ponty, a musical polymath who's been equally comfortable playing with bebop piano genius Bud Powell and Frank Zappa's raucously experimental Mothers of Invention, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and banjo wizard Bela Fleck.

The first to bring a horn-like attack and phrasing to modern-jazz violin playing, Ponty became a leading light of the jazz-rock idiom called fusion, recording a string of hit records that rocked and hummed with electronic effects and bracing solos.

In recent years, Ponty has cut back the electronics, concentrating on the rich sound of the violin and the elemental joy of spontaneous music-making. "With this quartet, I'm focused more on organic sounds," says Ponty, 67, who makes his first Bay Area appearance in five years at Yoshi's in Oakland this week. He's joined by his longtime French keyboardist William Lecomte, American bassist Baron Browne and the young French drummer Damien Schmitt. "I still use electronics as sound colors, but not as the main ingredient."

A fluent improviser whose fire and facility have not waned, Ponty sounds sensational on his last record, 2007's "The Atacama Experience." It's a sort of musical travelogue featuring music partly inspired by his trips to India, Ireland and the vast Atacama desert of northern Chile.

It opens with the sound of Parisian traffic and a hip-hop-bottomed version of Powell's classic "Parisian Thoroughfare," arranged by Lecomte. They'll play some of that music at Yoshi's, along with crowd-pleasers from hit albums like "Imaginary Voyage" and "Enigmatic Ocean." The title track of "Atacama" is the one purely electronic piece on the newest recording, a wash of otherworldly sounds inspired by the South American desert.

"It looks like another planet," says Ponty, on the phone from Paris, where he spends part of the year when he's not traveling or living in Los Angeles, which he moved to in the early 1970s when he began touring with Zappa. "It's the most arid desert in the world. There are no plants. There are these huge canyons. And it's silent. It triggered these sounds in my imagination - spacey sounds, not rhythmic. Time seems to stop there."

"I never dared to do it before, because I was afraid to sound too classical," says the violinist, who grew up in a family of classical musicians in Normandy. His father taught violin and ran the music school at Avranches. His mother was a piano teacher. Jean-Luc graduated from Paris' Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique at 17 and began playing in a major orchestra.

Intoxicated by the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, he learned to play jazz on clarinet but felt compelled to stretch out on his main ax. His dazzling playing caught the ear of expatriate American jazzmen like Powell and saxophonist Johnny Griffin, the French public and rockers like the English band Soft Machine, who tapped him to record.

Working with Zappa, Ponty was exposed to all kinds of electronic devices - distortion, echo and wa-wa - that young inventors brought to them to try out.

"It was exciting for me as a violinist to be able to plug into all these devices and come up with sounds that no violinist had ever done before," Ponty says. "It also stimulated my imagination. I wrote some pieces that I never would've written without them."

But as much as he loved the energy and experimentation of rock, Ponty missed the "sophistication of jazz improvisation and from classical music, the sound colors, the more poetic and romantic moods." He sought to bring all those things together in his music.

In the mid-'90s, when he began touring with guitarist Al Di Meola and bassist Stanley Clarke in the Rite of Strings, Ponty began to concentrate again on the pure sound of the acoustic violin. "It refocused me on my abilities as a violinist and what I could do with this wood box, without amplification," he says. "I think what I am doing today is the sum of all my experiences," says Ponty, whose playing with West African musicians in the 1990s expanded his rhythmic vocabulary.

Playing with his old colleague Chick Corea recently, Ponty was pleased when a musician friend who hadn't heard him in years said he sounded as good as ever. "You wonder after so many years if you're not losing it a bit," he says. "As long as I can move my fingers and am physically able to play, I guess I will go on for a few more years."